


Speak Aloud

by clarinetta



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-25
Updated: 2012-08-25
Packaged: 2017-11-12 20:51:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/495513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clarinetta/pseuds/clarinetta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Overall, Stiles adjusts fairly well to being a ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Speak Aloud

Overall, Stiles adjusts fairly well to being a ghost.

He’s actually quite proud of himself, when he takes the time to sit down and think about his new and rather unexpected form of existence. From what he’s read of ghosts as a “species,” if you will, it seems that most of them are driven swiftly and violently insane with loneliness, which can lead to two things: The Angry Poltergeist or The Wailing Spirit. Both are frightening to the living, and both are dangerous to the innocent. So far (so far, he reminds himself every day), Stiles has managed to avoid becoming either one. It’s only been a few months since his death, but all things considered, he’s taking his continued sanity as a win.

_It can be pretty extraordinary what the force of your own will can accomplish._

—

Scott visits Stiles’s grave on a Saturday, three weeks after the funeral. There are deep bluish circles under his eyes; Stiles suspects Scott has not slept since the incident which stripped him of his best friend. He wants desperately to ask Scott about werewolf sleeping patterns (how long can you go without? how long before you collapse? is it longer than humans? how does it affect your powers?), but things are different now. He leans against his own gravestone and stays silent. (The stone is smooth and deep grey and nondescript, much like the funeral; simple, unadorned, quietly laid to rest next to his mother while his father and friends turned their heads away, unable to watch. Hurts to think about.)

Scott sits down heavily on the packed-down dirt facing the headstone, knee to knee with Stiles, though there’s no way Scott could know that. He watches his best friend struggled for the strength to form words, and he suddenly, jarringly understands why other ghosts go mad with loneliness.

“Dude…” It’s all Scott can manage before dissolving into tears.

“Shit, man,” Stiles says, and his voice is full of rusty nails.

It doesn’t take long for Scott to cry himself out and fall asleep curled up against the headstone. Stiles watches over him until he wakes up.

—

It’s a silly myth that ghosts can’t touch the living world without their hands going straight through it like CGI smoke. He can touch everything just like before; what he discovers is that the living world simply doesn’t respond. When he hugs his friends, he can feel their warmth under his arms, and at first it’s comforting, until he realizes that they don’t feel it at all. He tries slapping Scott in the face once; his hand hits solid cheekbone, but Scott doesn’t move, doesn’t even realize he’s not alone. Only with extreme focus and energy can he make himself known in the living world, and only for a short time, but he works at it constantly. He spends a lot of time putting Deaton’s advice into practice; it really can be pretty amazing what force of will can accomplish, and Stiles has never lacked for willpower.

—

“Dad.” Stiles attributes the fact that his father doesn’t look up to the (true) fact that his voice is mostly gone from shouting all night and the (also true) fact that his father is getting on a bit in years. “Hey, Dad,” he tries again, but his father’s eyes do not shift from the television screen. Something niggles at him at the back of his head ( _there’s something wrong here, Stiles, pay attention_ ), but before he can really work through it, his father’s cell phone rings.

“Stilinski here, it’s my night off,” he singsongs, but the voice at the other end sobers him up. “Nelson? What’s—” All colour drains from his face, and if he hadn’t already been sitting, Stiles is sure he would have fallen. “What… Oh, my god. Are you sure?…Yes. Yes, I’ll be right there.” The voice speaks again, and his father’s face crumples for a split second before he takes a deep, steadying breath. “I know. Thank you.”

“Dad?” Stiles kneels in front of his father, trying not to beg. “Please, Dad, talk to me. Come on, what’s going on? Dad!”

No amount of pleading makes a difference. The rational part of his brain beats at him: _something is really wrong here, Stiles, look, see it, see what’s happening_ , but the way his dad looks, the way he hurls the phone across the room with no real energy behind it, is frightening him.

He goes with his father to the morgue, and Nelson meets him at the front door. They share a hug, and Nelson leads him to the back of the room to a body covered in a white sheet splotched with red. Suddenly Stiles doesn’t want to see, doesn’t want to know, but it’s too late now and Nelson is lifting the sheet and Stiles stares at his own dead face, his own death-gray skin covered in bruises and cuts and thinks, _I should have known, really._

—

The ghost world is superimposed on the living world, almost like a plastic sleeve in a photo album. The two worlds can touch, and boundaries can be pushed (and oh does Stiles push them), but there are lines that can’t be crossed without ripping both the plastic sleeve and the picture. Stiles learns his limitations quickly.

He learns how to fight the monsters that gather around Beacon Hills without becoming one himself. He learns the difference between malicious spirits come to do battle and the quiet ones just passing through. He learns how to hunt in the living world, how to push the boundaries enough to hurt and scare away those who would try to ruin his city.

He comes away with blood on his hands, but it doesn’t matter. No one can see them anyway.

—

The first time he realizes he can communicate with the living world is the morning of his funeral. He doesn’t precisely want to be the modern day incarnation of Tom Sawyer and attend his own funeral, but when he sees his dad that morning, he knows he has no choice. Even though Stiles knows nobody can see him or feel him, he won’t leave his father alone on a day like this. So he sits in the front next to the Sheriff and watches.

It’s too much. The sun is too bright and his father’s tears are too real and Scott’s voice as he stumbles through his clumsily-written speech is too scratchy and it’s too much and very suddenly he’s running, abandoning his father and friends (again) to lean against a tree at the edge of the cemetery. He doesn’t even bother quieting his sobs; what’s the point?

But then he opens his eyes and Scott is there, standing frozen about a foot away, his eyes wide and golden with something a little like fear and a little more like hope, his ears tilted forward and pointing, straining, straining, and _oh my god he heard me, I don’t know how but he did and please let this be real, please._

“Scott?” His voice is high, wavering with unswallowable tears, and Scott’s face explodes with terror and joy.

_“Stiles.”_

—

There are days that play more like memories on a badly recorded videocassette: grey and fuzzy and unreal, voices faraway and distorted. There are days when Stiles just wanders around in a blank, infuriatingly empty fog, unable to see or hear or feel anything but white smoke and the indistinguishable screams of other spirits, driven mad by total isolation. Often he loses track of linear time, and sometimes he’s unsure of his own existence. There are other days full of battles and blood with the living and the dead in equal measure; eventually they learn, but there are always the naive ones, the stupid ones, the arrogant ones, and they keep coming and Stiles keeps fighting. These are the bad days, the ones he wishes he didn’t have burned into his memories, and they come frequently, blurring together, working almost viciously at Stiles’s sanity, picking and scratching and gnawing at it until he isn’t sure whether he’s gone mad already or not.

But there are also good days, days when the barrier between the dead and the living seems a little thinner, days when the sun shines and his friends smile and maybe they can feel him there, just a little—hovering just beyond the edge of perception, pressed up against the wall between seen and unseen, watching.

These are the days he fights the demons for. Protecting his friends and family, protecting his city from those who would choose to destroy it: it’s enough, more than enough, to keep him here.

—

_If you want to hear rumours about the Beacon Hills ghost, ask anyone within a hundred mile radius. The boy working at the counter in the Springfield hardware store will snap his gum, look around furtively for a moment, and whisper in a secret voice the ghost’s nickname (“‘Little Red,’ whatever the hell that means”), passed down through generations of local history. If you bring him food, the homeless man who sits on the corner of Main and Downing in Johnstown will smile a toothless bloody grin and tell you they called the ghost The Protector in his day. If you’re stupid enough to get wrapped up in one of the local gangs, the ghost is an unspoken feeling of impending danger; it is the reason you look over your shoulder everywhere you go. If you are a murderer of innocents, the ghost is the monster under your bed and in your closet, that deep hungry shadow waiting to eat you alive and make you pay for your sins. And if you can manage to find the retired English teacher on the east side of Beacon Hills and get her drunk, she’ll murmur about the wolves that came to town and the hunters that followed, so many years ago, when she was just a youngling herself, barely walking. Not wolves that howled and hunted, oh no: wolves that walked and talked and looked human. And maybe if you’re lucky, just before she falls asleep she’ll mention the name of a boy who ran with those wolves, fought with them and shielded them with his fragile body and died trying to protect them._

_However true these whispers may be (and most of these kinds of stories are—it’s often surprising how faithful local legends remain as they pass from ear to ear), they will never be anything but whispers. If you want the truth entire spoken aloud, you’ll need to find the man who lives at the edge of the winding mountain road, just before pavement turns to dust. And when you ask, his aged face will split into a smile so blinding and painfully nostalgic you might have to close your eyes for a moment against it._

_Ask Scott McCall to speak aloud, and he will tell you the story of Stiles._


End file.
